Malodrax

by Ben Counter

  ‘See, Gladian Scraw,’ Chaplain Chrysonerus said. ‘To you what lies beyond is an unknowable realm, where powers greater than any of us hold sway. To you it is a place of awe. To us, to the pure-hearted servants of the Emperor, it is one more nest of enemies to be purged. Brothers! Imperial Fists and Sons of Dorn! Will you follow me?’

  Gladian Scraw screamed as the Imperial Fists cheered and followed Chrysonerus into the gateway. Lysander was among them as they marched through the gateway to the Garden of Vharlan Ghesh, ruled over by a daemon prince sworn to the Blood God, a realm of bloody madness where his legions battled endlessly for the delight of their master.

  Lysander did not dwell on how Gladian Scraw died, doubled up with madness to look on the insanity of this realm. He did not even focus on the revenge the Imperial Fists took on Vharlan Ghesh, or the many battles fought there against the daemons of the Blood God. He focused instead on that moment when Chaplain Chrysonerus had called on his battle-brothers to charge into hell, and they had followed him.

  That was how much the Imperial Fists, the human race, hated daemonkind. That was how deep their disgust and their desire for revenge went. If they could, every Space Marine in the Imperium would storm into the warp and butcher every single daemon, every wayward thought the Chaos Gods gave form, and would march to the foot of those very gods’ thrones.

  Lysander’s mind had a whole gallery of these memories. The memories of hate, the force of a human’s anger focused through the discipline of a Space Marine and directed at the daemon. It was a pure hate, a disgust at the unnatural origin of the daemon and a rage at everything it stood for.

  Rogal Dorn had written that there was no star in the galaxy that burned as bright as an honest human’s hatred, and no hatred as hot as that directed at the daemon.

  The sphinx recoiled. Its front paw hovered over Lysander, its eyes focused far away.

  ‘Do you see?’ said Lysander. ‘Do you understand now what we are? For everything you are, for each one of us you kill, for every one you corrupt and force to his knees, there are a billion more directing every moment of their hatred at you. And what you feel now is something you have never felt, and that is my payment to you.’

  ‘And what is it?’ asked the sphinx. ‘What is this ice that flows through me? This dark claw that clutches my mind?’

  ‘It is fear,’ said Lysander. ‘My kind were created to feel no fear, but we understand it. We were all once men who felt fear as does anyone else, and we must know it because it is a weapon we wield.’

  ‘I have never felt this before,’ said the sphinx. There was a note of wonderment in its voice. ‘This fear. I have heard the word, I have seen it in the eyes of those thrown onto the altars of the Pleasure God, but I have never felt it until now! This is a sensation I feel for the first time. And so the toll is paid.’

  The sphinx stood aside. Behind it rose the great golden gates of the pyramid. The sphinx settled down on its haunches, taking up its place watching over the bridge. Lysander walked past it and the gates began to open.

  He glanced behind him. Talaya had watched the exchange with a curious smile on her face. As Lysander approached the palace gates she turned away and walked back into the sprawl of the city.

  The sheer lavishness of the palace was designed to dull the senses and overwhelm an inquisitive mind. It was a kind of camouflage, Lysander realised, just like scrim nets stretched across an Imperial Guard camp or the baffling burst of signals emitted by a strike cruiser to mask its communications.

  The inside of the pyramid was divided into countless chambers, curved and irregular in shape, by walls plated in gold and silver or lacquered in deep blue and vivid violets. Scaffolds were set up everywhere and a small army of the city’s people were swarming over them, painting in sketched-out frescoes on the ceiling or laying mosaics on the floor. Lysander could make out the vaguest hints of twisted bodies in the paintings, inhuman shapes and features melting into one another. A sense of uncleanness crawled over him and he looked away. The floor was no better, for while the designs were abstract they were mesmerizingly complex. They seemed to want to draw his eyes right out of his head.

  ‘You!’ cried out a voice. Lysander looked up from the floor to see one of the painters advancing towards him. It was a man, his age impossible to guess given the artistic mutilations covering his face. His nose had been cut off, leaving a pair of nostril slits, as had his ears. His eye sockets had been pared back to reveal the whole of his eyeballs, unblinking and rimmed with exposed muscle. He wore paint-spattered robes and carried reams of parchment and canvas covered in paintings and sketches. ‘Take up a brush or a trowel, newcomer! Beautify this place! Scrub away its ugliness!’ He looked Lysander up and down, appraising his crimson armour and sword. ‘Eyes of the warp, you are ugly enough yourself. Just by standing there you put us back months! Make yourself useful!’

  ‘I seek Shalhadar the Veiled,’ said Lysander.

  The artist dropped the mass of painting he was carrying. ‘No one sees the Veiled One,’ he said.

  ‘He will see me.’

  ‘We are not there yet!’ cried the artist. The painters and mosaicists looked up at his outburst. ‘The story hasn’t reached his entrance! He is in the wings, ugly one!’

  Lysander grabbed the artist by the shoulder, gripped hard and lifted the man off the ground. The artist’s mutilated eyes rolled in fear. ‘Where is he?’ demanded Lysander.

  ‘In the… in the wings…’ gasped the artist.

  Lysander threw the artist aside. ‘Out!’ he yelled. ‘Everyone out!’ He drew his sword and held it high.

  The people of Shalhadar’s city clambered down from the scaffolds and ran for the gates. Their half-painted frescoes glared down with thousands of eyes set in daemonic faces. Those working on the mosaics fled too, leaving scars in the unfinished floors. Among the artisans Lysander saw the many varieties of the city’s heresy – some had decorative scars and mutilations like the lead artist, and others were robed and stitched like the cultists from the alleyway. There were new ones, too, like those with patches of iridescent scales sewn onto their skin or with their flesh blistered up with wriggling egg sacs. The latter reminded Lysander of the brood mother, and he steadied his hand against the instinct to cut them down.

  With his sword in hand, Lysander walked further into the palace. It was impossible to tell how far the palace extended, for the dimensions within the pyramid made little sense given its apparent size when seen from the outside. With the artists gone sounds echoed from deeper in the palace – footsteps perhaps, skin on skin, the whispered voices of daemons. Shadows coalesced on the edges of his vision, the movement banished when he tried to focus on it.

  Ahead a vast domed space opened up. It resembled, of all things, an opera house, with an enormous pipe organ dominating one wall, reaching high up to the arching ribs of the ceiling. A round stage stood in the centre of the hall, surrounded by circles of seating.

  As Lysander entered, the light from thousands of candles hanging in holders from the ceiling went dim, save for a shaft of light falling on the stage. A single figure walked into the light. Lysander couldn’t see where he had entered from. He wore a long white robe and his face was heavily made up in white, with black lips and eyes daubed on as if his features were twisted in mourning.

  ‘Many thanks, traveller, for your attendance at our sorrowful show!’ said the actor in a wailing voice. ‘You could have been anywhere in the infinite galaxies this night! Enveloped in the bosom of fleshy luxury. Riding the waves of the endless ocean of the mind. On some distant world of beauty, grasping its ethereal wonder before it is spoiled by the cruelty of the mundane. But no! You are here, with us, to witness the Tragedy of the Cadaverous Lord!’

  Lysander realised he was being addressed, though the actor did not look at him directly and spoke to the whole opera house as if every row were packed with spectators. The actor bowed
gravely and was spirited away again, vanished into a hidden trapdoor or by an optical illusion. Lysander chose not to sit.

  The lighting shifted to the warmth of a morning sun. Dozens of extras walked across the stage now, in archaic Imperial dress such as that still favoured by some of the Imperium’s oldest aristocracies. They wore ruffs and long trains, enhanced with decorative bionics. Their bionics were non-functional, and where they met the skin the actors’ makeup could not conceal the torn skin and weeping wounds.

  They began a song of longing and misery, echoed by strains of music from the pipe organ and from concealed musicians whose sound boomed from every direction. The actors hit harmonies too complex for their apparent numbers. They sang of how the soul of mankind had withered away, leaving the people empty and barren.

  ‘Where has gone the oversoul that conquered Terra/Where has gone the lust to enslave stars?’

  A great and benevolent power saw the suffering of the human race. It was depicted by a voice booming from off-stage, presumably belonging to a man of the city selected for his deep, reverberating baritone. Lysander could not be sure if it was a god or some kind of collective will of humanity.

  He could not see where the tale would lead yet, but it brought about such an unease in him that he felt a flicker of a very human weakness. His bile rose and he had a stale, acid taste in his mouth, though he could not place just what in the opera and its performance was affecting him.

  He could walk onto stage and throw the actors off. He wouldn’t even have to bloody his blade. Bare fists would be more than enough. But he reeled in his hatred again, that only minutes before he had been baring raw and bleeding for the sphinx at the gates. He did not remind himself what he had done to get this far, because it brought about a deepening of his unease.

  The god called forth its servants, all garbed like angels from the margins of prayer books. They had wings of wooden frames and feathers, and golden halos riveted to their temples. They danced and sang of the infinite wisdom and kindness of their master, who still went unseen and unnamed. One among them was different – he wore a mask of gold, and his feathers were golden, too, laced with red ribbons and gemstones. According to the lyrics he was most favoured of the god’s servants and was sent down to humanity to give them back the joy and life they had lost.

  But this servant, over the course of the next hour or so, fell from grace. He first deprecated the temples built to him, and said he should not be treated as a god, but eventually he came to accept them and then to desire them. He lounged among throngs of concubines brought to beautify his court. He gave the people a purpose, but it was to serve him, to glorify him and grant him his every desire. He was corrupted through and through until even the people could not pretend he was anything else.

  The actor playing this false god did not remove his golden mask throughout the performance, until a climactic scene where the people finally rose up and demanded he prove to them that he was a god deserving of their adoration. The false god rose from his throne of heaped-up bodies and threw back his hood, taking his mask in his hands as the music swelled and he sang of his power and perfection, and damned those who doubted him. He would show them the face of their god, and they would be struck into blind, mindless servitude to look on it as punishment for rising up.

  The false god took off his mask. Beneath was a rotted, skeletal face, the skin peeled away and the muscle turned to a maggoty pulp. The eyes were sunken in their sockets and the teeth grinned from pared-back lips.

  A terrible atonal music of horror took over. Actors in Imperial garb rushed across the stage screaming, contorting. They trampled and threw one another from the stage. Such was the violence that Lysander was certain the blood was real. Some were dragged off stage insensible, perhaps even dead.

  When it was done and the stage was empty, when even the false god had left for the wings, a few survivors straggled into the light. They sang they would follow the greater power, the one who had been usurped and betrayed by his corrupted servant, for they had seen how the false god’s corruption had manifested itself in the face of a corpse. They vowed to worship only the true power, to follow his path and reach his city. They took the symbols of the Young Prince, the Sigil of Pleasure, and the Hand Unchained, to deny the false god’s ancient dogmas of obedience, denial and suffering. And so the tragedy ended on a note of hope, a counterpoint to the horror of the climax.

  The clown-like narrator shambled back onto the stage, newly spattered with blood. ‘You who could have been anywhere, nestled in a velvet pit of pleasure or kneeling before the altar of the awesome, you chose instead to grant us the honour of your attention. And our gift to you is the Tragedy of the Cadaverous Lord! Thus the one called Emperor enslaved the souls of his people. But what of our brave band who saw the fall from grace, who espied that corpse-face on the mask of gold? In this city, wonder of wonders, they gather! Before the Veiled One, Lord of Lords, they kneel! And that is the greatest honour you could give us. To stand among us, to marvel at the beauty of Shalhadar, and to cast back the darkness of the Corpse-God from this holy place.’ The narrator bowed low, and with a final soaring note from the hidden musicians the light fell dead and the opera house was full of darkness.

  Lysander steadied his breathing. The performance was finished, but he had not finished his business here.

  Someone was clapping a few seats away. Lysander looked closer and saw the actor who had played the Cadaverous Lord, still in full costume with corpse mask, applauding the play. A spotlight came up on him and up close Lysander could see the mask was not just a facsimile – it was rotting flesh, wriggling with maggots and shedding flakes of desiccated skin as the actor clapped.

  ‘Such economy of expression!’ the Cadaverous Lord said. ‘Such purity of vision! A truly great work cuts to the heart of its subject. The cruelty of a regime that shackles the mind, the very function of its creativity, and yet a regime that is borne also of the misguided will of those same minds, must have posed an irresistible opportunity to the author. And a challenge, for who could encompass such grand tragedy? Indeed, it is impossible. The work we have seen does not attempt to do it, but to hint at it, so the mind of the audience fills in for the truly appalling fate of the human race. Do you not think so? Tell me, you cannot have watched this unmoved.’

  Lysander looked into the mask’s eyes, but there was nothing living there, just the dried-out whites like crumpled paper sitting deep in the sockets. ‘You are Shalhadar the Veiled,’ said Lysander.

  ‘And why,’ replied the Cadaverous Lord, somehow managing to place a quizzical expression on his decaying face, ‘would you say that?’

  ‘Because this was meant for me.’

  ‘This, my friend, is an ancient work of the greatest cultural resonance. One of the classics.’

  ‘Everywhere I have gone on this planet,’ said Lysander, ignoring the Cadaverous Lord’s words, ‘I have been tested. A daemon tested me to let it relive the glory of the time it spent before slavery. Another challenged me to best it in a trade, to get what I wanted without giving up what I could not afford to lose. And the creature you keep outside tested me, too, to pay its toll. That is what this world does. Every planet touched by the warp has its own way of inflicting suffering. I have walked on them and seen it. Malodrax likes to make us dance, to complete tests as if we were schoolchildren, before we can get a glimpse of what we seek. I will play its game, daemon prince, for now, which is just as well for you because that performance was another test.’

  ‘What a curious interpretation,’ said the Cadaverous Lord, his voice conversational as if he and Lysander really were two enthusiasts of the arts discussing the latest performance. ‘So the creator of this work has set us a challenge. Thus we are not passive, as witnesses, but active, as participants, striving against the author’s will! Truly he is a master. But if this is true, my new friend, what is he testing in us?’

  ‘Not in us,�
�� said Lysander. ‘In me. I am a Space Marine and a servant of the Emperor, as you became aware from the moment I came within sight of your city. A Space Marine witnessing the blasphemy of your play should feel disgust and anger, and more than that – he should feel hatred. Hatred enough to storm onto the stage and butcher the actors, and tear your city apart searching for the playwright. If I had done that, you would have no use for me, because to merely be in your presence would cause me such revulsion that I would strike out against you. This is my duty, reinforced by the hatred a Space Marine must feel.’

  ‘Just as well you passed, then,’ said the Cadaverous Lord.

  ‘There is a deeper hatred in me than your heresy inflamed. Even seeing you dressed as my Emperor, pantomiming him as a betrayer and a tyrant, was not enough to eclipse it. That was what I was being tested for. A hatred deep enough for you to use to your benefit. That is what you need from me, Shalhadar the Veiled. That is what I have shown you.’

  ‘So,’ said the Cadaverous Lord, ‘you would not call yourself a fan?’

  ‘It seems I overestimated Shalhadar,’ said Lysander. He stood and turned for the exit from the opera house. ‘I understood he needed useful men he could exploit, by offering them what they desired in return for their service. Evidently he has no use for a Space Marine after all.’

  ‘I did not say that,’ said the Cadaverous Lord.

  Lysander stopped in mid-stride. ‘What does it matter what you said? You are just an actor.’

  ‘As are we all,’ said the Cadaverous Lord. He removed the mask of rotting flesh. Inside there was no face, just a deep, swirling darkness like the depths of an ocean or a starless tract of space. ‘The greatest vice to which I will admit is curiosity. After so many tens of thousands of years of existence, it is rare that my attention is grabbed. But you have grabbed it. A Space Marine on Malodrax is hardly new, for the Iron Warriors have infested it since your Age of Heresy. But one who claims loyalty to the corpse-god is something else, especially one who walks willingly into my city.’